Chen Jie observed and analyzed a deadlock. Assuming systemd-kmsg-syslogd
is already stopped, but rsyslogd is not started yet:
1. systemd makes a synchronous call to dbus-daemon.
2. dbus-daemon wants to write something to syslog.
3. syslog needs to be started by systemd.
... but cannot be, because systemd is waiting in 1.
Solve this by avoiding synchronous D-Bus calls. I had to write an async
bus registration call. Interestingly, D-Bus authors anticipated this, in
documentation to dbus_bus_set_unique_name():
> The only reason to use this function is to re-implement the equivalent
> of dbus_bus_register() yourself. One (probably unusual) reason to do
> that might be to do the bus registration call asynchronously instead
> of synchronously.
Lennart's comments from IRC:
> though I think this doesn't fix the problem in its entirety
> simply because dbus_connection_open_private() itself is still synchronous
> i.e. the connect() call behind it is not async
> I think I listed that issue actually on some D-Bus todo list
> i.e. to make dbus_connection_get() fully async
> but that's going to be hard
> so your patch looks good
So it may not be perfect, but it's clearly an improvement.
I did not manage to reproduce the original deadlock with the patch.